Cultured Code Things

For all of life’s to-dos--paint the guest room, take out the recycling, file income taxes--Things keeps a running checklist. A honed interface nearly always helps manage objectives in an empowering way. Things makes us feel more productive and helps us stay on task, despite its occasional shortcomings.

Things adapts to you instead of forcing you to use a particular system, such as Getting Things Done. It fully supports that approach, but you can take as much as you want from those rules, or come up with your own checklist system. The application’s power comes from its ability to manage lists of up to hundreds of current tasks while allowing you to focus on just a few at a time.

The Today view presents a manageable group of the day’s objectives. You can move items in and out of the space, and it’s a relief to concentrate on just a few to-dos instead of the running chronological Next list of every single task. Best of all, items with a start date remain hidden until you can actually accomplish them--“Buy CD” won’t show up until after the CD you want to buy is actually available, provided you’ve entered that information.

Recurring tasks are also easy to organize, such as a weekly recycling reminder. Many variables make Things fit into different workflows, including the option to set a recurring task to repeat only after it’s been accomplished, so that important tasks don’t disappear if you happen to forget them on the day they were scheduled to occur.

Additional options let you stay organized in a way that works for you. Project tasks organize big items, breaking them down into individual, manageable steps. Task keywords and notes enable quick searches. Tasks can even link to Mail messages or be associated with Address Book contacts. And when viewing a list of tasks, you can drag items around to change the order, scheduling each day in a way that works for you.

Things occasionally faulters with omissions or needless confusion. We wanted an option to see every upcoming task in the Next view, even if it’s scheduled for the future, as in the CD example. But Things makes you toggle between the Next and Scheduled views to see everything outside of the Today view. While Cultured Code plans to address this in an update, you can’t have repeating items within projects. Projects with finished tasks don’t appear in the Today list to ask if they’re complete. And you can’t shift an entire project, full of date-sensitive tasks in a relational way; instead, you have to manually readjust every deadline within the project.

Depending on your task-management needs, you might run into a few
frustrating limits. But most of the time, Things will keep you on task
and productive.

Flexible system usually fits your workflow, including GTD. Many parameters to create and schedule tasks. Today view shows just the current tasks. Syncs locally with iPhone Things (sold separately). Can read iCal To Dos and turn them into tasks. Can’t repeat items within projects. Can’t shift all task deadlines within projects together. Finished projects don’t appear in Today view for check-off. No option to preview scheduled items in the Next view.